‘US domestic security turned massive failure’

Runners continue to run towards the finish line of the Boston Marathon as an explosion erupts near the finish line of the race in this photo exclusively licensed to Reuters by photographer Dan Lampariello after he took the photo in Boston, Massachusetts, April 15, 2013. (Reuters/Dan Lampariello)

Since 9/11 the United States spent over $700 billion on national security but as the Boston tragedy showed the money went to nothing, American lawyer Jesselyn Radack told RT.

The former ethics adviser to the United States
Department of Justice believes Washington will increase
surveillance after this attack, which would be
myopic.

RT:The US said it will charge the Boston
bombing suspect with – possession of weapons of mass destruction,
what is that?

Jesselyn Radack: I wish I could tell you more
about that, but I haven’t actually seen those charges leveled
against anybody. Obviously they are considering the WMD to be the
bombs, which they termed ‘improvised explosive devices’ – a
military kind of term. WMD sounds pretty
horrific.

RT:They were talking about home-made bombs,
pressure cookers, and now it’s WMD. How is that even possible, when
you talk about home-made bombs?

JR: I honestly believe that it’s because the
suspect here is Muslim. Obviously there have been a number of white
people who’ve committed massacres lately in Colorado or Newtown,
Connecticut. None of those people were charged with terrorism or
terrorism-type charges.

RT:After the bombings lots of media and
people were discussing the possible connections of the suspects
with other countries. What do you make of
that?

JR: I think immediately there was a desire to
frame this as an act of terrorism and therefore to try to put the
label on these men that they were Islamic jihadists. The only
positive spin I could give here is that people were trying to
distance themselves from it to make it feel more normal, but the
more sinister interpretation is that obviously we have a lot of
islamophobia and anti-Muslim bias in this country as evidenced by
the fact that the suspect is treated as a terrorist, while other
people got different charges.

Reversing the usual presumption

RT:Because of the only suspect alive
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s background there were a lot of arguments
leading up to today. First, reading his rights, then charging him
as an enemy combatant and now other arguments about his rights and
interrogation. Where is the legal system in all of
this?

JR: The legal system should never put up with
that. I think most reasoned people knew he should be mirandized.
Maybe there was a small window during which they could ask him
about immediate public safety concerns. They were trying to call
him an enemy combatant and that is the reason why they would not
have to mirandize him. We’ve seen it in other cases, for instance,
with José Padilla. They called him an enemy combatant and he didn’t
get to see a lawyer for some three-and-a-half years. So all along
there has been this effort to treat him differently than any other
criminal, who should be tried in a federal criminal
court.

RT:Do you think it’s his background that was
leading to this?

JR: Not even so much of his background as
immigrating from Chechnya. I think it was more discovering that he
and his brother were both Muslim and discovering that the
defendant’s older brother had been watching radicalized video
propaganda. I actually watch the same stuff as part of my job in
national security and human rights so that doesn’t necessarily mean
that you are a terrorist.

RT:Russia tried to warn the US that they
should check into this, but the minute the news came out everybody
was talking about his background, some people were even confusing
Chechnya and the Czech Republic. What do you make of
this?

JR: I think it was a massive ignorance on the
part of Americans in terms of both geography and religion. Islam is
a peaceful religion. It doesn’t believe in bloodshed. Again it was
to immediately put this person in the category of ‘others’.
Normally we operate on innocent until proven guilty in this
country, but for this suspect they are reversing the usual
presumption and that was clear from the get-go. And apparently the
FBI failed because Russia tipped off the FBI years ago that they
perhaps should be concerned with the elder
brother.

RT:Certainly the US didn’t do anything
about it and a blame game started soon after the bombings. They
were talking about him and his brother being in the US for just a
short period of time, not having lived in the US, which makes the
story completely different.

JR: It clearly does. The narrative that they tried to
feed everyone with as if they’ve recently come to the US, they were
radical Islamic jihadists. And then it turned out that the suspect
came here when he was 9 years old, and then you get Senator
Grassley saying that we need to be tougher on immigration. But what
are you going to do, ask 9-year-olds if they have a propensity for
terrorism? And the younger brother seemed to be following the older
brother, who apparently was more radicalized.

RT:Do you consider this as a case of home
terrorism since they’d been here for a long time?

JR: I would in terms of the Oklahoma City
bombings by Timothy McVeigh. But I don’t think he was actually
charged with anything like possessing WMD even though he improvised
filling a truck with fertilizer and causing far more deaths by an
order of magnitude compared to the three people that unfortunately
died in Boston. So you can call it domestic terrorism by the
charges of McVeigh certainly didn’t sound
war-like.

$700 billion did not help

RT:After 9/11 the US increased its
domestic security yet something as big as the Boston bombings
happened. Has the US failed?

JR: I believe this was a massive failure of
the surveillance state that we’ve created in America. Since 9/11 we
spent over $700 billion on national security and a lot of that is
surveillance with video cameras, with massive date collection, with
fusion centers, and none of those helped to deter or detect any
terrorist plot. And while the surveillance video was useful in
reconstructing what happened it didn’t prevent
it.

RT:Do you think the US will increase surveillance
after this attack?

JR: Unfortunately I think that would be a myopic
reaction in America. Not to say why did surveillance fail to detect
but rather to have even more surveillance, which would be a really
unfortunate outcome.

RT:The US seemed divided over the legality of
the procedures. While some congressmen called the suspect enemy
combatant others tried to say there is the constitution and that
one should stick to that. Where do you think is this going to take
the debate?

JR: We’ve been having this debate since 9/11. I
happened to be the whistleblower in the case of American Taliban
John Walker Lindh, and that was a few months after 9/11. And back
then they were talking whether or not to charge him, to call him an
enemy combatant or an unlawful belligerent, and whether or not to
mirandize him. When I eventually blew the whistle it was on the
fact that they would not let him see his lawyer. And when they did
mirandize him they said that there are actually no lawyers in
Afghanistan. So this debate has been going on. I think that law is
pretty settled. You can’t just designate someone in America an
enemy combatant and do with him whatever you want. You have to go
to court first. And I think Padilla’s lawyers understood that this
was going eventually to end in court and that’s why they finally
allowed him counsel and charged him.

RT:Who is going to win such
debate?

JR: Right now unfortunately the people who’ve been
dismantling our constitution will lose. I think there will be
renewed measures in Congress for designating people as enemy
combatants and new definitions of terrorism.

RT:Do you think there will be more islamophobia
in the US after these incidents?

JR: Unfortunately I do, because as you noted from
the very beginning, narrative started to form, they placed these
suspects into another camp and particularly into a terrorist camp.
President Obama initially was very careful not to call this an act
of terror and not to use that word, but the next day he was calling
it an act of terror. And there started to be rumors that having
come from Chechnya, which has a large Islamic presence but not
normally associated with Al-Qaeda, they got radicalized. I feel
that from the very beginning that was the best case scenario in a
lot of people’s minds to have them be Muslims, who became
radicalized and did this part of jihad. I feel this will only
increase people’s tendencies towards islamophobia.